Art in an Octagon: The Schinkel Pavilion Berlin

The Schinkel Pavilon in Berlin-Mitte is perhaps Germany?s most unconventional art association. Where GDR nomenklatura once held cocktail parties, now Douglas Gordon, Cyprien Gaillard and Isa Genzken hold exhibitions. ... more

18/10/2005

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 18.10.2005

Gustav Seibt goes into the ring for the Berliner Zeitung, whose chief editor came out strong yesterday against a takeover by the British investment group 3i (See yesterday's "In Today's Feuilletons"). For Seibt, the paper is "the most important East-West laboratory
in the Federal Republic". "Everything the lacklustre reform rhetoric
has been trying to instigate for half a decade has been happening here
for ages: the painful, passionate, fruitful and inspiring. It's
something of a tragic joke that these investors, with their illusionary ideas on how to increase value and no knowledge
of the newspapers, the German language or recent German history, now
want to take over this of all papers. Because anyone who has worked at
the Berliner Zeitung has experienced what the rest of Germany is in
for, and knows how much can and will go wrong. Today it's the only quality newspaper in the capital that makes a
profit. It will only be able to maintain this level if the unique blend of generations and experience on the paper's staff remains intact. Because these people are Germany. They are more needed than many others in the newspaper business."

Frankfurter Rundschau, 18.10.2005

Ina Hartwig reports on plans by Suhrkamppublishers, Germany's most renowned publishing house, to group their religious publications in a new Verlag der Weltreligionen (world religions publishers). In addition, an "edition unseld", named after the late head of Suhrkamp Siegfried Unseld,
is also to be started up in autumn 2007 and tailored to the needs of
uninitiated readers. "This series seems to be less aimed at providing
information to a knowledgeable group of professionals than at
developing a general pedagogical Eros. The concept of the
'edition unseld' is based on an interdisciplinary, essayistic and above
all general-knowledge treatment of themes which according to the
publishers are increasingly determining public discourse. By this they
mean findings in the natural sciences, from the cognitive sciences and
genetic research to the most recent neuron and quantum theories. Whether the name "edition unseld" is well chosen or not, especially as Siegfried Unseld was at heart a literary publisher, remains open."

Die Welt, 18.10.2005

According to Sven Felix Kellerhoff, the researcher Henry Leide has uncovered new aspects of purported anti-fascism in the GDR in his book "NS Verbrecher und Staatssicherheit" (National Socialist Criminals and the 'Stasi' â secret police). The Stasi blackmailed former Nazis with their history to force them to work as IM's (unofficial informants), who spied on suspicious GDR citizens. "Thus the GDR citizen Kurt Harder, former bureaucrat in the Nazi Department of Security in Berlin and Theresienstadt, was blackmailed with his past and, beginning in 1957, delivered 3,300 pages of spy reportage. Not on the Nazi pasts of others, however, but on critical kindergarten teachers, dissatisfied policemen and the like. The former member of the Gestapo at Auschwitz, Josef Settnik, had to sign a "statement of commitment" as an IM in 1964 and reported thereafter on his Catholic parish and his company. The Stasi bureaucrats told Settnik he had 'a lot to make up for' and that could only be achieved 'through a constant and efficient fulfilment of obligations'. Even when evidence emerged that Settnik had personally tortured concentration camp prisoners, the Ministry of State Security protected their spy."

die tageszeitung, 18.10.2005

Without his songs, the 90s wouldn't have been what they were. Max Dax meetsMartin Gore, the mastermind behind Depeche Mode. The group's new album "Playing the Angel"
has just been released. "Gore comments during the interview that his
Ginger Ale had run out, and says, 'I know it's dangerous to say, or even
think, that hard drugs and alcohol can help musicians make great music.
But on the other hand I can say looking back: We survived it â whatever
you take 'it' to mean in particular. And it's also true to say that we
wrote music history. Sometimes it's helpful to have a little tension around to get you into top form.'"

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18.10.2005

A short but nice meditation on reading today, reprinted from the Guardian. Ian McEwan
writes that in the 18th century novels were read almost exclusively by
women. And things are no different today, as he experienced while giving out books
in a park in London and being approached by pretty much only women.
"Cognitive psychologists with their innatist views tell us that women
work with a finer mesh of emotional understanding than men. The
novel - by that view the most feminine of forms - answers to their
biologically ordained skills. From other rooms in the teeming mansion
of the social sciences, there are others who insist that it is all down
to conditioning. But perhaps the causes are less interesting than the
facts themselves. Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales
all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead."

Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K. read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.read more

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talksÂ Â about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.read more

Saturday 20 - Friday 26 November, 2010

The theatre event of the week came in a twin pack: Roland Schimmelpfennig's new play, a post-colonial "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Thalia in Hamburg. The anarchist pamphlet "The Coming Insurrection" has at last been translated into German and has ignited the revolutionary sympathies of at least two leading German broadsheets, the FAZ and the SZ. But the taz, Germany's left-wing daily, says the pamphlet is strongly right-wing. What's left and right anyway? came the reply.read more

Saturday 13 - Friday 19 November, 2010

Dieter Schlesak levels grave accusations against his former friend and colleague, Oskar Pastior, who spied on him for the Securitate. Banat-Swabian author and vice chairman of the Oskar Pastior Foundation, Ernest Wichner, turns on Schlesak for spreading malicious rumours. Die Zeit portrays the Berlin rapper Harris, and the moment he knew he was German. Dutch author Cees Nooteboom meditates on the near lust for physical torture in the paintings of Francisco de Zurburan. An exhibition in Mannheim displays the dream house photography of Julius Schulman.read more

Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west.Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.read more

Saturday 30 October - Friday 5 November, 2010

Now that German TV has just beatifiedPope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.read more

Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.read more

Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.read more

Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.read more

Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare explains why his country has become uninhabitable. German Book Prize winner Melinda Nadj Abonji says Switzerland only pretends to be liberal. German author Monika Maron is not surethat Islam really does belong to Germany. Russian writer Oleg Yuriev explains the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the Petersburg Hermitage. Argentinian author Martin Caparros describes how the Kirchners have co-opted the country's revolutionary history. And publisher Damian Tabarovsky explains why 2001 was such an explosively creative year for Argentina.read more

Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.read more

Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.read more

Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin'sincendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has buckled under the stress of the past two weeks and resigned from the board of the Central Bank. His book, "Germany is abolishing itself", however, continues to keep Germany locked in a debate about education and immigration and intelligence. Also this week, Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been awarded the M100 prize for defending freedom of opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech at the award ceremony: "The secret of freedom is courage". The FAZ interviewed Westergaard, who expressed his disappointment that the only people who had shown him no support were those of his own class. read more